The answer is that it depends. The region that was Palestine is now
divided into several political entities with its own
jurisdictions and laws. There is the Israeli state within the
pre-1967 borders, the annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights,
the Gaza Strip, and the (remainder of) the West Bank which is further
subdivided into Area C, where Israel exercises domestic jurisdiction
and Area A&B, where (on paper) the Palestinian Authority
exercises domestic jurisdiction.
In each of these, Palestinians (except for the Golan Heights where no or few Palestinians live) have been evicted by Israel. Whether
they have been offered "adequate compensation" for leaving their homes
has depended on the circumstances and on what one consider
"adequate" compensation. The total number of eviction orders since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 must be in the thousands so I'll provide three examples to illustrate my point. Note also that during the 1947-1949 Palestine war, Israeli forces deported tens of thousands of Palestinians, whose land and property were subsequently seized by the Israeli state with the legal backing of the Absentees' Property Law. These Palestinians and their descendants - who now number in the millions, most of whom are refugees - have not been compensated and how to fairly restitute them is one of the main issues of the "Palestine Question".
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and shortly thereafter razed
the Mughrabi Quarter
in the Old City of Jerusalem and evicted its inhabitants to make room
for the Western Wall
Plaza. The whole
quarter was the property of the waqf that administers the al-Haram
al-Shariff
(Temple Mount). Each of the families evicted was offered 100 to 200
Jordanian dinars. Thomas Philip Abowd writes (Colonial Jerusalem,
p. 132):
With the belated arrival of written orders of expropriation came an
Israeli offer of “compensation” to those whose homes were
demolished. The mukhtar [mayor] related that some of the residents
of the Moroccan Quarter community took the compensation. But most,
including his family, have refused the money on principle to this
day. The official Israeli notification estimated that the mukhtar's
property was worth 200 Jordanian dinars, a sum not even remotely
approaching the value of his home.
The Negev Bedouin in southern Israel have long been a thorn in
the eye of the Israeli state. For decades it has tried to settle
pastoral Bedouin tribes in Bedouin towns constructed for the
purpose. Rahat is one such
settlement. The question of Bedouin land ownership is a difficult one because the Bedouin have traditionally not kept official documents of land
ownership. Despite this, their claim to land has historically been
respected. Thus,
Israel has often offered them land plots in the Bedouin cities in
exchange for giving up their ancestral land:
In the early 1960’s, the Israeli government began a process of
relocating the Bedouin to “townships” in order to put an end to
Bedouin land claims in the Siyag and “free up” the land for the
state.25 Moshe Dayan, the Minister of Agriculture at the time, said,
“We should transform the Bedouin into an urban proletariat... this
phenomenon of the Bedouin will disappear.” The idea that the Bedouin
should be able to choose a rural, agricultural life, like the
kibbutzim and moshavim that were sprouting up in the Negev, was off
the table. 26 This relocation was accomplished by offering to
compensate Bedouin for the land claims if they agree to
relocate. Nevertheless, most Bedouin refused the meager compensation
for the loss of their lands and traditional lifestyle, and more than
3,000 land claims remain unresolved.
However, in 2018, Israel convinced the about 350 villagers of Umm
al-Hiran to relocate in exchange for an unspecified amount of
compensation. According
to some villagers, they were acting under duress. A few months prior
to the agreement Israeli forces had shot to death a local Bedouin math
teacher during a demonstration against the planned demolition of the
village. According to
previous
reports,
the compensation included 800 m^2 of land in Hura, a nearby Bedouin
town, and up to NIS 200,000 ($57,264) to every family evicted.
A third example is the villages of Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron
hills in Area C in the West Bank. Israel in the early 1980s
declared the 3000 hectare land Firing Zone
918 - a
closed military zone. I believe the legal backing of the order stems
from the Emergency
Regulations
adopted by the British in 1945 and as such the military is free to
declare Palestinian territory "closed military zones" and evict the
inhabitants without offering any compensation at all. However, Israel
has offered to let Masafer Yatta's community continue working their
land for two non-consecutive months per year and on Jewish
holidays. The community rejected the
offer.
Be wary of selection bias. People that Israel "adequately compensates"
for forcibly evicting them are less likely to complain about it and
thus less likely to be in the news.
